Once an actor has accepted her role on stage, she needs to initiate her own ideas. "She needs to contribute to the end result as much as anybody else," says Keefe, who believes businesspeople must follow similar principles when accepting a task and meeting the needs of a group. Another SCC workshop exercise highlights these collaborative skills. One person strikes a pose. This pose is an "offer" that the person's partner must accept and answer with another pose or interaction. Totally nonverbal in nature, this exercise forces participants to act after listening -- to respond to body language in the same way that one would scrutinize and reply to words.
Keefe says companies need to "shake up the snow globe" to escape linear patterns and refresh forgotten elements of a business. Taking a new look at an old thing can prove more fruitful than creating brand-new products, he says. And humor helps. SCC shook up 200-year-old Kraft in one specific brainstorming seminar. Four SCC facilitators played typical shoppers in a wholesale club, hamming it up along the way. After scrutinizing the act, the 100 Kraft workers teamed up and generated a whopping 150 promotional and product ideas. "I think we achieved a lot more than we would have if we had not used Second City Communications to facilitate," Winter says.
It's also important, Goodwin says, to contribute to people's ideas rather than to detract from them -- or, even worse, dismiss them as boooorrriinng. Creativity is about emotion. It's not about logic. A great actor can draw context out of the person next to her by consciously reacting to the pair's mutual energy. On stage this is called "the moment." The audience, along with the cast, becomes incredibly aware of the powerful bond between the two people on stage.
In a business, "the moment" might manifest itself in seamless solution-finding, better brainstorming, and more effective teamwork. But this is an advanced lesson. "Improvisation is not something that someone can pick up in one shot or in one event," Goodwin says. It is a learning process and a very powerful tool that bears much fruit. So far, she says, the only group that's had a problem with improvisation was a bunch of isolated Illinois librarians who had always worked alone. "Most of our clients are out in the world, interacting with people a lot. But every now and then we'll get a group that's tucked away within an organization that might be a little bit harder to bring out to work as a team. But we still do."
In the end, Keefe says, good humor means good business. People who have a good sense of humor typically communicate and manage new projects better. Personal humor and self-awareness infuse all facets of an enterprise -- including the all-important customer experience. "When you approach a customer-service person at the airport, you can sense immediately whether he has a sense of humor," Keefe says. "It's in the way that he looks at you, in the way that he talks to you, and in the way that he greets you. Humor contributes positively to every interaction."
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